Why Trump always wants a crisis

How did the president try to justify the “public safety emergency” he used to deploy the National Guard to Washington and seize control of its local police force?

He said there was crime — “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” said President Donald Trump in a stark attack on the nation’s capital. The solution? Military force. “We’re going to put it in control very quickly, like we did in the southern border.” The president later described Washington as more violent and dangerous than some of “the worst places on earth.”

None of this is true. The Justice Department itself announced in January that crime in the capital is, according to data from its Metropolitan Police Department, “the lowest it has been in over 30 years.” The MPD cites a 26% decrease in total violent crime this year compared with the same period a year earlier. And the areas around the White House, where the president has made a point of stationing National Guard members, are not known for crime or disorder (unless you count the Jan. 6 rioters, pardoned by Trump in one of the first acts of his second term). Despite several high-profile incidents — including an assault on a young member of the Department of Government Efficiency — there is no evidence to support the president’s hellish depiction of the district.

But his claims are less reason than pretext. Trump is simply enthralled by the image of a crackdown, especially on those he’s deemed deviant. Recall that he wanted to use the Insurrection Act during the protests of the summer of 2020, asking his secretary of defense, Mark Esper, if soldiers could shoot protesters “in the legs or something.” In addition, and perhaps more than anything, he wants to appear in charge, whether or not he’s accomplishing his goals.

The president’s action in the capital — the first time a president invoked the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 to take over the city’s police — is just the latest in a long list of so-called emergencies he has conjured up to claim unilateral authority over the American people.

In January, alleging an “invasion” of the country, Trump declared an emergency on the border as pretext for the use of federal troops for immigration enforcement. In March, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 with the claim that a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, was conducting “irregular warfare against the territory of the United States,” a definition of “warfare” that cuts against legal precedent and the plain meaning of the word. Trump used this emergency to unleash immigration authorities on anyone deemed a “gang member,” removing them to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador.

And in April, he announced a theretofore nonexistent national economic emergency, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to “address the national emergency posed by the large and persistent trade deficit.” With this, Trump claimed the power to impose broad tariffs at his absolute discretion, beginning a trade war with much of the world.

In addition, Trump has invoked emergency powers to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court; to punish Brazil for its prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro; and to threaten our northern neighbor, Canada, with import duties.

None of these were real emergencies. There was, and is, no external crisis facing the United States. But for reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.

In his 1948 book “Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies,” political scientist Clinton Rossiter observed that while the Constitution lacks a formal switch for emergency governance, Congress has, throughout the nation’s history, permanently vested the president with “vast discretionary powers to be exercised in time of war or other national emergency, usually to be determined and proclaimed by himself.”

This accretion of emergency powers continued well past the postwar period and into the present — a steady concentration of power in the person of the president. You could even argue, as Garry Wills did in “Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State,” that the advent of atomic weaponry and the subsequent Cold War produced “a permanent emergency” that has “made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.”

By this view, Trump represents a difference of degree — albeit an extreme one — and not a difference of kind from predecessors who ignored the law, denied constitutional protections and abused presidential authority under the guise of national security.

To the extent there is a limiting force on the use of emergency or crisis powers — before, during or after the 20th century — it is a president’s commitment to the constitutional system itself. President Abraham Lincoln claimed vast new powers for the presidency that he tried to justify as necessary evils to save the Union and preserve American liberty.

In the face of insurrection, he wrote to Congress in 1862, “It became necessary for me to choose whether, using only the existing means, agencies, and processes which Congress had provided, I should let the government fall at once into ruin or whether, availing myself of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection, I would make an effort to save it, with all its blessings, for the present age and for posterity.”

In a nation made supposedly of laws, we have gambled on the discretion of men to keep the use of crisis authority in check. With Trump, we played a bad hand. Rather than treat emergency powers as a dangerous tool to be wielded with care and caution, this president has used them with reckless abandon as a toy — a means through which he can live his fantasies of strength, domination and authoritarian control.

Beyond the psychological impulse, there is a practical reason that Trump has embraced emergency powers and crisis government through pretense: He can’t do anything else. Look past his boastful claims of deal-making prowess and you’ll see a president who struggles to hold his own in a negotiation of equals and is too acutely solipsistic to persuade a skeptic of his own view. Even his much-vaunted (by subordinates and admirers) trade deals and agreements with institutions of higher education are less exchanges than a form of extortion, in which he uses threats of pain, punishment and legal action to impose a settlement.

Every occupant of the Oval Office is tempted by the immense powers of the presidency. A president with neither the disposition nor the ability to do the work of ordinary democratic politics — of deliberation, negotiation and compromise — is bound to abuse them. And this is all the more true for a president who doesn’t want order as much as he does submission and revenge.

Americans of the revolutionary generation were preoccupied with the problem of power. “For mankind are generally so fond of power that they are oftener tempted to exercise it beyond the limits of justice than induced to set bounds to it from the pure consideration of the rectitude of forbearance,” observed Daniel Dulany, an influential Maryland lawyer, in 1765. Power was a necessary part of human affairs, but it had to be tamed lest it trample over liberty itself.

The British Constitution — understood not as a written document but as, in the words of John Adams, “a frame, a scheme, a system, a combination of powers for a certain end, namely, the good of the whole community” — was thought to be perfectly balanced to restrain power in defense of liberty.

It did this by giving each segment of English society, the royalty, the nobility and the commons, its own role to play in the maintenance of the commonweal. “So long as each component remained within its proper sphere and vigilantly checked all efforts of the others to transcend their proper boundaries,” explained historian Bernard Bailyn, “there would be a stable equilibrium of poised forces each of which, in protecting its own rights against the encroachments of the others, contributed to the preservation of the rights of all.”

Or, as influential Massachusetts lawyer James Otis wrote in 1762, “This when the checks and balances are preserved, is perhaps the most perfect form of government, that in its present depraved state, human nature is capable of.”

(Otis then went on to add, in what reads as an ominous note given present circumstances: “It is a fundamental maxim in such a government, to keep the legislative, and executive powers, separate. When these powers are in the same hands, such a government is hastening fast to its ruin, and the mischiefs and miseries that must happen before that fatal period, will be as bad as those felt in the most absolute monarchy.”)

The issue for the colonists was that one of those powers, the crown, had reached outside its proper jurisdiction. It seized authority that it did not rightfully have. And in doing so, it threatened the rights and liberties of the people. It is part of the irony of the American experience that to restrain power, Americans built a government more powerful than that which they had before.

If Trump had an appreciation for that irony — which is to say, a sense of restraint — then we would be in calmer waters than we are now. Unfortunately, he sees power in precisely the way that 18th-century Americans feared: as an excuse to accumulate more power.

Trump is abusing lawful authority, as well as outright breaking the law, so that he can construct something above the law — an emergency government that imposes upon and runs roughshod over American freedom. And with every exercise of this ill-gotten power he desires more, proving the minister Jonathan Mayhew’s observation, made a short year before the Stamp Act crisis, that “Power is like avarice, its desire increases by gratification.”

The president’s most famous attribute is that nothing, for him, is ever enough. He has never had enough real estate, or enough wealth, or enough praise, adulation and worship. We should have realized, after his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, that he couldn’t have enough power, either. He still can’t. And only time will tell what that means for our efforts to govern ourselves.

I suspect that, as Trump inevitably works to extend his personal dominion over the entire country, we’ll find renewed value in the insights of our revolutionary forbearers. We may even decide to put them to use.